Can You See Me Now? Painting The Aging Body

About

RYAN LEE is pleased to present Can You See Me Now? Painting the Aging Body, a group exhibition co-curated by Jeffrey Lee and artist Clarity Haynes. Featuring select works from an expansive and esteemed roster of painters who are women-identifying, the show represents a shared exploration of the aging body across generations. From Samantha Nye’s sexy portrait series of four older women at their most bodacious, to Beverly McIver’s intimate self-portrait holding a doll, the artworks both individually and collectively celebrate the immense grace, grandeur and fortitude of aging.

We exist in an era that values women for their reproductive capacities while at the same time limiting them; an era that defines beauty as the province of the young and systematizes the visibility of protoyouthful attributes; an era in which women and people in general are held to the one-way standards of the male gaze. 

Amidst a global climate in which both bodily autonomy and corporeal dignity are increasingly threatened for women and LGBTQIA people, this exhibition allows and applauds their many tones and figures, recognizing and appreciating their innate diversity. Through the choice to focus on the medium of painting, the curators are deliberately addressing the monumentality and permanence of this perspective. Inspired by Emma Amos’s and May Stevens’s stances on painting as a political act and mechanism for forging visibility, Can You See Me Now? foregrounds the significance and excellence of aging women through their own lenses and narratives, praising the overt visibility of the complexity, stamina and energy of their existence. 

At the crux of the exhibition is May Stevens, whose series around her aging mother was what first spurred the curators into an exploration of art’s depictions of the aging body. This series is often eclipsed by the rest of Stevens’s robust œuvre, which touches on subjects of landscape and the natural world, characterizations of bigots in the acclaimed Big Daddy series, and the Ordinary/Extraordinary series about Rosa Luxemburg, the persecuted Marxist activist whose identity Stevens often uses as a contrast and parallel to artworks and depictions of her own mother. Why, the curators posed, was the subject matter of aging not granted more consideration within the contexts of this artist’s work overall? Where, in the fine arts, is the aging body given its due pedestal? The works on view present paintings that portray this subject, honoring that everyone ages, everyone’s body is different and distinct, expressive, special, and emotive in its own right; we are meant to be not only visible, but seen. 

Through her work, Haynes, a queer feminist artist, has expanded boundaries of how we consider the body and its representation. Her ongoing series of torso portraits features a variety of subjects, body forms, gender expressions, ages, and accessorization. Acting as a second conceptual pillar for the show, Haynes’s curatorial and artistic stance reflect an embrace of the vastness of femme, trans and nonbinary bodies, and the requisite honor they deserve.

Haynes’s and Stevens’s art engages with other work in the exhibition, including the vivid, narrative portrait Shelia Pepe by Angela Dufresne; work by textural painter Brenda Goodman, whose large-scale Can You See Me Now? Painting the Aging Body Co-curated by Jeffrey Lee and Clarity Haynes September 14 – October 21, 2023 Including works by Emma Amos, Bailey Doogan, Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, Clarity Haynes, Mala Iqbal, Hung Liu, Beverly McIver, Samantha Nye, Joan Semmel, and May Stevens nude image of her with her partner, Double Portrait, evokes a lesbian American Gothic. Emma Amos’s kinetic and explosively colorful collage-painting, My Mother was the Greatest Dancer; Joan Semmel’s powerful self-portraiture of her own aging, yet astute and agile, body in Skin Patterns; Samantha Nye’s series of small-scale paintings on the glamor and owned sensuality of being an older woman; Mala Iqbal’s up-close and personal To Ponder, an androgynous, contemplative, gently expressive portrait; Finding Comfort, a painting by Beverly McIver of herself and a mammy-style doll gifted to her by a friend, capturing a vulnerable moment; artist Hung Liu’s stately painting Grandma, and Bailey Doogan’s nuanced, tactile portrait Breast, Age 59.

In its holistic and expansive appreciation of aging bodies, this exhibition is a narrative constructed of stories that subvert and usurp the persistent male gaze through their reclamation of perspective. Can You See Me Now? poses its questions to its audience, but also the art industry at large. Collaboratively and intentionally intergenerational, the exhibition celebrates and exalts the body, aging and changing, and uses the exchanges between a diverse set of preeminent artists to explore its ranges of romanticism and solemnity alike – and the agency, power, dignity and beauty inherent to it. Alongside the exhibition, RYAN LEE is publishing a catalogue of writing pertaining to the themes explored in Can You See Me Now?, including an essay by Jillian McManemin. This public resource will endure as a compilation reinforcing the visibility of aging women, trans and nonbinary people in the arts and culture at large.